


Care Package

by discomore



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alcohol, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Drunkenness, Gen, Gravity Falls Secret Santa 2020, Older Dipper Pines, Older Mabel Pines, Pines Family, Pines Family Bonding, Pines Family Feels, Pines Family Fluff, Post-Canon, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:35:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28602300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/discomore/pseuds/discomore
Summary: When Dipper accidentally reaches out during a rare moment of weakness, Mabel decides that he could use an urgent pick-me-up.(CW for underage drinking/drunkenness)
Relationships: Dipper Pines & Ford Pines & Mabel Pines & Stan Pines, Dipper Pines & Mabel Pines
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	Care Package

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sakurablossomcreamlatte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurablossomcreamlatte/gifts).



> This is my gift to [sakurablossomcreamlatte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurablossomcreamlatte) for the Gravity Falls Secret Santa 2020! Many thanks to [endae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endae) for being the beta. Be sure to check out their amazing writing if you haven't already. 💖

Dipper was never going to be a spontaneous person. Sure, he’d had his moments of throwing caution to the wind and acting before thinking, but when most of those involved giant robots and-slash-or interdimensional demons, he would have to consider those as extraordinary circumstances rather than part of his actual personality. Methodical and calculated planning just came a lot more naturally to him.

He had long grown out of doing things like writing up comically long strategies to get a girl to like him back, or constructing walls of yarn and Polaroids at the slightest provocation. By the time he entered high school, he’d progressed to scribbling checklists (only three to four points on each at most, at Grunkle Ford’s suggestion) on Post-It notes and sticking them to whatever reasonably clean surface was around at the time. A bit haphazard, but it was a system that worked. So by and large, Dipper figured he had finally found a nice, safe middle ground between being too prepared and too unprepared.

Then he got drunk at a party at the end of Film Production Camp.

In all fairness, it wasn’t meant to be anything crazy. That’s actually what appealed to Dipper the most when he got the invite to a “small get-together” that Friday night to celebrate the end of camp. He’d spent the last few weeks learning the ins and outs of everything from camera equipment to editing, eagerly adding a new line to his college application drafts every time he successfully completed a training session. It was exciting and educational, but also quiet. Save for the instructors and a handful of teens around Dipper’s age, the camp was barren of other people. Clearly most high school students would attend a camp during a free summer rather than spring break, but it went without saying that his summers were always booked up.

Now, he didn’t sign up to the program to socialize, he did it because he loved what he was learning, and spring break was the perfect time to go for it. But weeks on end of seminars and training exercises had gotten to him and he had to admit, he felt proud of himself and wanted to acknowledge his accomplishments with something other than the certificate of completion he would be getting later that week.

So, he accepted the invitation to said small get-together happening in the dorm room of one of the fellow teens at the program. He did see the follow-up text that said there was a BYOB policy, so he knew booze would be present but figured since he wouldn’t be bringing any of his own, he wouldn’t be drinking that night. His experience with alcohol by then had extended to a single sip — and subsequently spat-out — drink of beer a few years ago with Mabel, who didn’t respond much better to the taste. But a couple of hours into that evening, Dipper had somehow powered through several drinks via a combination of sheer will, a card game where the only rule was to drink as much as possible, and a lot of Diet Coke. All of this led to Dipper’s plan to stop by and socialize for a spell before retiring early and maybe sleeping in for the weekend to crumble before it started.

Later that night, Dipper was storming out of the dorm room to head back to his own, talking to himself all the while as the party continued behind him.

“Stupid little… stupids. _‘Oh, sorry I didn’t have a camera on me at all times when I was twelve so that I could prove a Multi-Bear is a thing to a bunch of film nerds,’”_ he muttered as he fumbled with the door handle to his room. “Don’t know anything. Nerds.”

Dipper continued his fevered ramblings as he clumsily entered and locked the door behind him, fishing out his phone. He swiped and tapped until he got to the chat history of the exact person he wanted to talk to, straight away hitting the option to record a voice note.

“Mabel,” he declared, setting the phone down on his bedside table once he was certain it was recording. “Mabel, you would not believe th-the bullshit I just heard from Patrick Wu. Okay, you don’t know who Patrick Wu is, it doesn’t matter! Listen, so I’m telling Patrick Wu about the Multi-Bear, right, and first of all, he straight up does not believe that he exists because I don’t have ‘evidence’ — oh, I’m doing quotation marks around ‘evidence’, by the way — and that also, he thinks a better name for something like that would be, get this, a _Bear-Bear_.”

  
Dipper burst into giggles, stumbling on his feet. “Oh whoa, head rush.” He managed to stay seated on the bed without falling over his feet entirely, keeping his form steady with his hands on either side of himself.

“Anyway, so that was my night,” he continued. “Also. I know you’re not gonna like it, but I am drunk right now. I swear though, I wasn’t planning on it tonight! Getting drunk, I mean. But, heh, I think I’m realizing I’m pretty shitty at planning. Pretty shitty.”

Dipper fell silent, allowing himself a moment to fully feel the physical sensations overtaking him. His head felt like it was gently spinning and floating all at once, a buzz that was distinctly unfamiliar. His heart felt like there was a fist loosely clenched around it, rhythmically squeezing. That feeling was more familiar.

He fell back against the bed. The only light in the room was the glow of his phone screen bouncing off the darkened ceiling, still recording.

“Mabel, is there any point in planning anymore? I mean, the… the college applications, the career fairs, the moving… I know it’s what we’re supposed to do, to plan for a good future. But you know that the future can kinda just do whatever it wants. We both know that.”

The longer Dipper spoke, the more his entire body seemed to be sinking backwards into the bed. He half-expected it to fall through completely, revealing an abyss beneath. His own personal Bottomless Pit.

“So…Is there a point? I don’t know why I’m asking you. It’s okay if you don’t know. I don’t know either.”

He fell quiet again, staring up at the blue-white glow illuminating the ceiling. His spoken words and unspoken thoughts loomed over him, drifting in and out with his consciousness. Then, as if there was a shock to his system, Dipper sat up and grabbed the phone.

“Anyway, doesn’t matter, it’s like—” he glanced at the clock, shrouded in darkness. Dipper had a feeling he wouldn’t have been able to tell what the time was even if he could see it. “—super late, so I’m gonna go. Talk to you and Mom and Dad and Waddles and you tomorrow, promise. Bye.”

He then gave himself enough time to stop the recording, toss his phone back on to the table, and immediately fall back into bed to let the night overtake him.

***

The next morning, Dipper lifted his heavy head off the pillow, creases from the fabric still etched into his face from the deepest night of sleep he’d had in a while. He looked up at the clock hanging above his bed. Just a little past 10 a.m. How was it even possible to be asleep for that long and still feel so exhausted?

He shifted his position slightly and was suddenly hit with a combined wave of restrained nausea and what he could only describe as ‘sponge-brain’ as memories of the previous night came back to him. Groaning, he came to the conclusion that alcohol was worth nothing and he hated everything about it.

He was about draw the covers back over his face and squeeze in a few more hours of sleep when there was a rapt knock at the door. Dipper started at the sound, groaning again as he dragged himself out of bed. In the short distance from the bed to the door, with someone still furiously knocking behind it, he realized that he had managed to fall asleep last night without taking any of his clothes or shoes off. As if he didn’t feel pathetic enough.

Dipper decided the best course of action would be to answer the door, send whoever it was on the other side off on their merry way, then proceed to hibernate in that room for as long as humanly possible. Which would be until he had to leave back home for Piedmont in a few days.

Then he swung the door open to see Mabel standing in front of him, one hand posed up to knock once more with all the force of a battering ram, and the other holding a small suitcase.

“Wh—”

“Hey-o!” Mabel said chirpily, pushing past her brother and nonchalantly wheeling her luggage in. “Also no, I did not teleport here, just took a bus like a normal person.”

She dropped to the floor in a cross-legged position and began unpacking.

Dipper stood at the still-open door, trying to form a functioning thought and spectacularly failing. He stared dumbly at Mabel, sitting next to what was amassing to be a small mountain piled high with junk food from her bag.

“Okay, you took a bus here, but…” he trailed off, closing the door behind him. “… _why_ did you take a bus here?”

She continued unpacking without a pause, Dipper noticing that one of the items was not some kind of processed food, but a weighted object wrapped in brown paper. Mabel placed it carefully on the bed behind her.

“Because,” she sang, “I needed to give you this! Bwap.”

With a flourish, she held out a soda can with a very familiar label emblazoned across.

That was enough to snap Dipper out of his haze, grabbing the can from her hand. “Pitt Cola? Okay, where and how?”

“I have my ways. Now go and get yourself cleaned up! I have a lot of junk food to get through, and I’m gonna need your help to do it once you no longer look like Bigfoot when he was in high school,” Mabel replied, taking the soda can back.

Before Dipper could fully process her thinly veiled insult, she was standing him up and practically pushing him to the bathroom, leaving him little choice but to do what he was told.

After washing up and already feeling a million times better than he did when he first awoke, Dipper surveyed his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Dark circles and slightly untamed curls already came with the territory, so save for his eyes looking a bit bloodshot, he looked relatively the same as usual. What of course, was not usual for that morning, was that Mabel had turned up.

Dipper was assuredly glad that his sister was there. Stepping out of the bathroom to see her having made herself comfortable, taking off her shoes at the door and tossing her scarf over the back of his desk chair, made him feel the most at ease he had been since arriving at the camp weeks ago. Her presence alone was like a blast of color in the desolate bleakness of that simple dorm room.

Even so, once the fog in his mind had cleared and he remembered exactly what he’d said to her last night through the comfort of a phone screen, there was no mistaking why Mabel had overnight decided to pack up a bag and take a several-hours-long bus ride to see her brother who was going to be back home in just a few days. He readied himself to explain that whatever he said last night were simply drunken ramblings, that everything was fine, until Mabel spoke up first.

“Way better!” she observed. “Now that you’re presentable,” she picked up the brown paper-wrapped object on Dipper’s bed and handed it to him, “open it up!”

Dipper was even more intrigued by whatever was under the wrapping once he felt the heavy weight of it, but he couldn’t stay distracted. “Mabel, I—”

“Trust me, you’ll like it!” she goaded with barely contained excitement. Dipper restrained a sigh and figured he could still say what he wanted to once he got this over with.

He tore at the wrapping, which ended up being more layered than he thought. Whatever this was, it needed a lot of protection. The sheets of paper tore apart to reveal a silver gilded hand mirror.

Dipper stared at the hand mirror for an instant, then looked up at Mabel who was still grinning expectantly. He looked back.

“What am I missing here?” he asked dryly, turning the mirror in his hands. “I know it’s not a haunted mirror, Mabel.”

“Wait, let me see,” she sidled next to Dipper and began jabbing at the mirror’s handle and frame at random. “Instructions said to just find the — aha!”

The glass in the mirror began to morph, shifting from Dipper and Mabel’s reflections to a swirling whirlpool of color. A few moments later the image began to clear, though still out of focus, as if it was being swung back and forth. To Dipper’s growing amazement, he could hear voices coming from the mirror.

“’You sure it’s even working?”

“Of course I’m sure, if you would just let me handle it properly then—!”

He couldn’t believe his ears. “Grunkle Stan? Grunkle Ford?”

“Ah, Dipper!” The blurry image came to an abrupt halt and Ford’s smiling face came into view. “Glad you got it to work, Mabel!”

“Not a problem,” she replied. “Hey, Grunkle Stan!”

“Hey kids!” Stan popped up behind Ford to wave. “How’s this latest nerdy tech looking? I thought Sixer here lost it when he started going on about phone calls where you could actually see the other person, but this looks pretty good!”

Dipper chanced a glance at Mabel who gave the tiniest smirk back. They mutually decided explaining the concept of smartphones to either of their Grunkles would not go well. Again.

“This is amazing!" Dipper said in awe. "It’s nice to get to see you guys before the summer,” he added sincerely.

“Summer will be here before you know it. And hey, this year, you two will finally get to celebrate your birthday with a drink with me!” Stan said with a grin. “Notice how I didn’t say your ‘first’ drink because for one, I’m not a sucker, and two, those bags under your eyes are somehow looking more intense than usual, kid. Party a little too hard last night?”

Dipper winced though he couldn’t hold back a smile. “A little. But also, Grunkle Stan, we’re turning eighteen this year, not twenty-one.”

“Exactly! You’re telling me you can do practically everything else by the time you’re sixteen or eighteen, but twenty-one is some magical age? Nah, if there’s one thing those Brits got right, it’s keeping eighteen the legal drinking age. Also, frying everything. You wouldn’t believe the sort of stuff we had when we were up there, they got this thing called a butter pie— hey!”

The mirror shook back and forth in Dipper’s hands as he scrambled to keep it steady. The vision shifted from Stan’s suddenly blurry form to Ford coming back into view.

“Ignore your uncle’s rambling, the old age is catching up to him,” Ford said. Dipper heard an indignant scoff in the background.

“You’re older than me!”

“Now you admit it?” Ford quickly retorted with a smirk. It turned into a chuckle as Stan grumbled dismissively.

Dipper could feel himself smiling too. Grunkle Ford seemed to find it easier to laugh as the years went by. It was moments like these when he could barely reconcile the forebodingly cloaked figure emerging from a destroyed portal with his goofy, endearing uncle who never missed an opportunity to rag on his brother.

“Anyways, my boy, I wanted to tell you that I know you’ve been eager to hear more about our findings this past year and I haven’t exactly been communicating with you often,” Ford said apologetically. Dipper was quickly about to assure him that it was alright before Ford’s face broke into the picture of excitement.

  
“I was going to wait until you both came up for the summer to show you, but I figured I could use an extra pair of very capable eyes to take a look at…” Ford let his words peter out dramatically as he shifted the mirror again to show an object in his hand.

Grasped in his uncle’s gloved hand was what at first looked like a giant shark tooth, but Dipper immediately surmised had to have come from something far weirder. It barely fit between all of Ford’s six fingers, a mass of yellowed bone littered with deep etchings and curving from a large base to a single sharp point.

Dipper gasped in delight. “Whoa! That looks incredible, Grunkle Ford, what is it?” he began babbling. “Is it from some kind of Kraken? Or another dinosaur?”

Ford laughed, clearly not surprised by his nephew’s enthusiasm. “Why don’t you take a look? Lean back!”

He barely had enough time to tilt his head back away from the mirror frame before Ford pushed his arm through, the tooth suddenly very much in front of Dipper’s actual face in his actual room.

“Holy—,” he stuttered, turning to Mabel to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. She laughed at the shock on his face.

“Surprise number… whichever one this is!” she cheered.

Dipper laughed in disbelief and gingerly took the tooth from Ford’s hand, which then disappeared back into the mirror. “Okay, please explain what just happened.”

“Portal mirrors, my boy!” Ford replied. “I had the idea for them sometime back, but never got around to developing them further until now. Functions like a smaller portal without all of the interdimensional travel mess. This is still just a prototype, hence why I can only pass something the size of this specimen to you—”

“And not a real memento like this motherload we got!” Stan called out from the other end. Ford moved the mirror to show Stan hoisting a barrel of gold and jewels up in front of him. “And this ain’t even half of it! Think I finally beat your record for ‘How Much Treasure You Can Steal Off of a Paranormal Creature’, pumpkin!”

Mabel gestured with an air of indifference. “Yeah, yeah, wait ‘til I give those unicorns another visit!” Stan let out a proud laugh in return.

“Anyway Dippy, though I have no idea why, ‘figured you’d be more interested in a dragon tooth of all things rather than any of this,” Stan said, gesturing at the treasure. “So it’s officially yours. Only because I don’t do exhibitions at the Shack anymore, o’course.”

“And Dipper,” Ford added, returning to view, “I was going to run some tests on that specimen myself, but I think Stan and I will stick to investigating the loot we got from the dragon’s den instead.” He paused. “Rather, I’ll try to investigate and make sure your uncle doesn’t bury it somewhere first. I’d like you to do some analysis on the tooth in the meanwhile and we can compare notes come this summer?”

Dipper nodded fervently, already itching to get started writing in his journal. “Thank you, Grunkle Ford, Grunkle Stan!” Ford beamed.

“I look forward to reading what you find, Dipper. Stan and I are about to set off on another trail so we’ll talk to you kids again soon. Take care, both of you!”

“See ya knuckleheads soon!” Stan called out. The four of them said their goodbyes as the mirror's vision warped and steadied until Dipper and Mabel could only see their reflections.

“Well, now I know why we couldn’t just FaceTime,” quipped Dipper, placing the mirror and tooth aside. “Not that they would even know how to use it.”

“Exactly!” Mabel giggled. “Face them up against an ancient monster, no problem, but hand them an iPhone and it’s chaos.”

The twins laughed together, and Mabel reached into her purse to toss Dipper a package wrapped in tinfoil and a matching one for herself to unwrap. “Not another weird thingamajig, just a burrito.”

He placed the wrapped burrito on his bedside table and instead opened the top drawer, picking up a pen and his deep blue leatherbound journal emblazoned with a pine tree symbol. “I’ll eat later, I wanna get started on an entry for this tooth before I forget.”

“Suit yourself, nerd.”

The twins fell into a comfortable silence. Dipper leaned against the headrest of his bed as he wrote while Mabel ate and scrolled through her phone, lazily twirling back and forth on Dipper’s desk chair.

Dipper figured this would be as good of a time as any to say what he wanted to. He twirled his pen between his fingers, a new habit he was trying to develop for his nerves instead of biting off and ruining every pen he owned. “Hey, uh, Mabel?”

Mabel cheerfully hummed to indicate she was listening, placing her phone aside.

“I know I must have sounded, uh, off, last night,” Dipper said carefully. “And today’s been really nice, don’t get me wrong. But you and Grunkle Stan and Ford didn’t have to do all this.”

“I didn’t tell them about last night, just that I was going to be making a trip over to you,” Mabel shrugged. “I mean, maybe they could tell something was up? But all they had to do was get the mirror to me through Mermando’s network, you know how fast that can be. And anyway, this is just as much for me as it is for you. I could’ve waited until you came back next week but there’s been literally nothing to do. Also I’m pretty sure I managed to get even Mom and Dad to want me out of the house for a while. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the living room is basically now a shrine to the art of knitwear.”

Dipper snorted in response and Mabel smiled before tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear and going in for another bite. There was something so mature and practiced in that small action that made Dipper take pause once he saw it. This seemed to happen more frequently as they got older. Entering high school, earning a driver’s license, and getting drunk for the first time were all incidental experiences of growing up that passed them by in a flash of momentary excitement. But occasionally, the twins would look at one another, or even themselves, and realize with a start that they weren’t looking at their twelve-year-old selves anymore. The pen twirled more rapidly between his fingers and he forced himself to get back to writing, training his eyes back to the journal.

“Dipper?”

He looked up and met Mabel’s line of sight. One thing that had changed the most about his sister as they grew older was, oddly, her eyes. Though Dipper could still see the ever-present twinkle that had been there since they were children, there was now an underlying layer of concentration to her gaze. There was always such an intensity to the way Mabel looked at the world and responded to it. A lot of the time, he was able to cruise along with his sister’s eagerness, sometimes even being the more zealous one of the two when the situation called for it. But being the target of his twin’s laser sharp focus in that moment made him feel like he was under an actual laser, heat and unease creeping over him at being so seen.

“I know you know that we can’t always be there for each other every time we need it most,” she said, her thumbs twiddling even as she kept steadily looking into Dipper’s eyes. “But… you know that we’ll always still _be there_ for each other, right?”

Let it be said that even though Dipper and Mabel were two of the most different kinds of people a person could be, nobody could understand what one was saying better than the other. Even though the wording was clumsy, Dipper knew what his sister was trying to say — that even though they’re getting older and it’s scary, everything will be okay. Just look at what they’ve already gone through.

But that was that summer. Everything was different then. Extraordinary circumstances and all.

They had other summers since, full of joy and contentment and very much not full of family drama and apocalypses. They were great, of course they were, but if Dipper was going to be more honest with his thought process, there was so much more to his life than Gravity Falls and that terrified him.

Though he and Mabel ended that summer by climbing on to the bus together certain that they’ll venture headfirst into the unknown, ready or not, he had naively thought that life would be smooth sailing from then on. You can’t get much more of a doomsday scenario than, well, literal doomsday.

But then a seed of doubt planted itself in Dipper’s mind and had grown into an arching vine as the years went on and the responsibilities, then expectancy of more responsibilities, mounted in front of him. It was an unpleasant tension that he’d grown so used to having around that the idea of even beginning to rip it down seemed impossible. It was only easier to let it continue to wind around the recesses of his mind.

So when faced with something as nurturing and comforting as his twin sincerely assuring him that everything was going to be okay, Dipper felt himself physically deflate. There was no other way to describe the sensation of his shoulders sagging, his lungs releasing a deep breath he hadn’t realized he’d taken. He wanted to immediately brush off what Mabel had said, that of course he knew and understood and everything is fine and she didn’t have to worry and last night was just the one time he wasn’t feeling too great and wanted to say something, he was drunk, it won’t happen again.

Before he could let any of those assurances tumble out, Mabel broke the silence with an exasperated sigh. “Dipper, why the hell are you about to apologize to me?”

Dipper blinked then crossed his arms. “I wasn’t! I was just going to say—”

“Fine, you weren’t about to say the words ‘I’m sorry’ but you were basically going to do that thing where you say a bunch of excuses for _feeling bad_ and brush it off, as if that’s something to feel sorry about!” she retorted.

“I _am_ sorry about it!” Dipper hit back. He shut the journal in his lap, fingers digging into the leatherbound cover and his eyes cast downward.

A heavy silence settled over the room. Mabel stood up and kept her half-eaten burrito aside before moving to sit on the edge of the bed, one hand on top of the covers to fill the space between herself and Dipper. His eyes drifted to her outstretched hand as he remained quiet.

“Are you mad that I’m here?” she asked.

Dipper’s eyes snapped up to meet Mabel’s. She was calmly looking back at him though he could see a glimmer of unease in her eyes. It wasn’t an accusation out of hurt feelings, but a genuine question borne out of worry that she may have overstepped.

He shook his head. “No, Mabel, I’m not mad at you at all. I think I’m just…” Dipper trailed off, breaking eye contact. “I think I’m just mad at myself.”

There was another beat of silence. “Huh. That’s deep.”

Despite the nerves crawling under his skin, Dipper burst out laughing. “Thanks for the insight.”

“Anytime, ya goober,” Mabel replied. She smiled gently and let the silence hang. Dipper knew she was purposely leaving a space for him to fill, not forcing him to open up further, but also not allowing him to get away too easily. He could change the subject, find something else to talk about, suggest they watch a movie. Keep himself distracted too.

But in that space of restful shared quiet, he found himself compelled to let those nerves out.

“I get mad at myself for not being okay all the time,” he blurted out in a rush. Mabel said nothing in return, but he hadn’t expected her to anyway. “And I think I get mad at myself for that because I _should_ be okay. I know that it’s normal for other people to stress about things like college and careers and the future, but Mabel…we’re not normal.”

She let out a breath. “Ain’t that the truth.”

“Heh, yeah, even before that summer we were certified weird,” he chuckled softly. “But what I mean is, with the things we’d done, the things we’d seen… I just think that any moment I spend not terrified for my life or anybody else’s, I should be grateful. Because I know what it’s like to think that I may not have a future at all. So how dare I be so scared of it when I should be glad I even have one?”

Dipper swallowed. Even though these were thoughts that had darted and swam through his mind for years, saying them out loud, and to Mabel no less, made them seem so strange. He felt horribly exposed and yet, he had to admit, deliriously relieved.

He chanced a glance at her. He expected that she would be distressed at knowing that Dipper could be so cruel to himself, all while she had no idea. And though the expression on Mabel’s face showed that, he was surprised to see solemnity there too.

“I get that way too,” she replied. It was Mabel’s turn to avert Dipper’s stare as he looked in shock. “C’mon, you can’t look that surprised when you literally just told me that’s how you feel!”

“Yeah, but, it’s not the same!” Dipper spluttered. He knew that it made no sense to his own ears, but his stubbornness broke through as he argued. “We were kids then and, fine, we’re still kids now, but back then we were kids in a situation that was, was…” he sighed, trailing off.

“Weird?” offered Mabel, with a half-smile. Dipper conceded with another sigh.

“Yup. Weird.”

“Look, Dipper,” she continued, eyes solemn again. “I don’t know what the right way for us to feel is. You’re right, what we went through was beyond weird and nobody, not even the greatest psychologists in the world, will be able to really get it. But what helps stop me from going nuts is remembering that, no matter what, I didn’t go through it on my own.”

She nudged his leg gently with a balled-up fist. “And that there’ll be plenty more weirdness in life to go through with them.”

Dipper let her words wash over him. Part of him tried to let her wisdom sink in, knowing full well that she was right and he should listen, but he’d spent so long letting the negativity thrive within him that he wasn’t sure how much time it would take for it to wilt away. The other part wondered how anyone could have once assumed he was ‘the smart twin.’

“You know what we should do?” Mabel piped up. “Every time either one of us has a bad thought about ourselves, let’s pretend we’re actually saying it to the other person. That way we can tell whether it’s something worth hearing or us being stupid.”

Dipper considered it for a moment. “You know what? That’s actually a good idea.” Mabel swatted at him and he laughed. “Okay, yeah, you’re full of good ideas.”

“I have one more good idea,” she declared, standing to her feet. She picked up the journal and pen in his lap, kept it aside, and lifted him up to stand as well. Once they were stood facing each other, she rose her arms to silently warn him that she was coming in for a hug.

Dipper rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Is this one meant to be awkward or sincere?”

Mabel strode across the gap between them and wrapped her arms around him. Her grip was fierce around her brother, the sheer physical strength of her hold only surpassed by the earnestness behind it.

“It’s meant to say that I’m here,” she said resolutely.

Dipper was not going to cry, he told himself. That’s not why he was unable to say anything. He just couldn’t find the right words to verbalize what he wanted to tell Mabel, to assure her, to thank her. Blinking rapidly, he settled on simply hugging his sister back, hoping his own hold told her enough as he exhaled and closed his eyes.

For all his best efforts, Dipper knew that he may never become a totally carefree person. At his core, there would always be a voice that would urgently need to know what the next part of his life would hold, aware that the future will always be the unknown until it became the present, but still desperate to try to plan for it anyway.

Yet it was during days like that day, when his incredible, amazing, weird-as-all-hell family banded together to be there for him simply because they could, that it seemed like no matter what the future held, he might be okay. And it was during moments like this, with his twin hugging him close to remind him that he will never be completely alone, that he was certain he will be.

**Author's Note:**

> Added this in later but wanted to bring it to people's attention that the portal mirror idea actually came from the credits of the Weirdmageddon 3 pitch, made by Emmy Cicierega! You can watch it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G2I11HBUv8).


End file.
